The Shigir Idol from the Urals was carved about 11,500 years ago. When the Great Pyramid was built, it was already almost 7,000 years old, older than the pyramid is today.
The events
- The Shigir Idolc. 9500 BC · Shigir peat bog, Middle Urals. Gold prospectors found the carved larch figure, covered with faces and patterns, in a peat bog in 1890. Radiocarbon dating in 2018 put it at about 11,500 years old, more than twice the age of the Egyptian pyramids and contemporary with Göbekli Tepe. It once stood over 5 metres tall and is now kept in Yekaterinburg.
- Great Pyramid of Gizac. 2560 BC · Giza. The Great Pyramid, built for Pharaoh Khufu at Giza, rose about 146 metres high. It remained the tallest human-made structure for nearly four millennia and is the only surviving Wonder of the Ancient World.
More amazing facts
- 9500 BC · 3000 BC Göbekli Tepe was built around 9500 BC, 6,500 years before Stonehenge.
- 5050 BC · 2560 BC Chinchorro fishermen on the Chilean coast were mummifying their dead by about 5000 BC; their mummies predate Egypt's by some two thousand years.
- 3300 BC · 3200 BC Ötzi died in the Alps around 3300 BC, about when writing appeared in Sumerian Uruk.
- 2600 BC · 2560 BC The Peruvian city of Caral, with its stepped pyramids, flourished in the same age as Egypt's pyramids — more than 4,000 years before the Incas.
- 2560 BC · 2000 BC When the Great Pyramid of Giza was built, woolly mammoths still lived on Wrangel Island — the last of them died out only around 2000 BC.
- 2560 BC · 31 BC · 1969 Cleopatra (born 69 BC) lived closer in time to the Moon landing (about 2,040 years) than to the building of the Great Pyramid (about 2,490 years).